Derek Jarman's garden at Dungeness

Best known as a gay activist, writer, artist and filmmaker, Derek Jarman’s physical end in 1994 followed an heroic and well-documented struggle with AIDS. A last act was to make a film whose completely blue screen and soundtrack commentary was a brave testament to having gone blind. He lies over Romney Marsh in one of England’s most beautiful sheep-frequented chuchyards, in the towering presence of a two thousand year-old yew tree.

Derek Jarman

Jarman was a gay renaissance man, cheekily canonised by the Sisters Of Perpetual Indulgence in a shoreline ceremony before his clapboard cottage and lovingly created sculpture garden, where he managed to grow a profusion of bright flowers and herbs in the nuclear terrain of Dungeness. His journals similarly captured the vibrancy of gay life and gay politics against the backdrop of a Thatcherite Britain.

The rebel in Jarman was closely shadowed by a late 1940s, early 1950s upbringing, travelling to rather grand places as the career of his RAF father Lance dictated. This ambivalence showed itself in Jarman’s appetite for lying across Charing Cross Road protesting with Jimmy Somerville with members of Outrage!, his attraction to cruising and all the liberating elements of the thriving London scene, and a private reticence at betraying the values of his parents’ privileged world. In paint, celluloid and intimate writings Jarman wrestled with his vision of a new gay Jerusalem.

It was Jarman who took the homoerotic story of the martyrdom of St. Sebastian, a young man pierced with arrows, featured in such gay literature as Yukio Mishima’s Confessions Of A Mask, to make the film Sebastiane in 1976. Not only was the dialogue in Latin, giving it a certain stylistic campness, but as a way of looking positively at gay sex, it was a pioneering British production. Read the rest of this entry »

Captain’s log - Latest Mothership Updates, plus VAT frozen at the Mothership Store

Location change and email change now automated

Hot on the heels to the upgrade to Mothership Gay Dating’s SHOUT system, we’ve now automated the location change and email change facilities.

To change your location or email address simply follow the instructions under ‘Account Management’ on the Dashboard. Keep our email address up to date so you can receive Mothership’s regular enewsletters, as well as email alerts when you’re messaged, rated or crushed onboard.

Location change is a doddle now, which means you can even quickly change your location when you’re visiting another city for the weekend for example, as well as permanent moves. Better still, the behind the scenes functionality we’ve put in place to enable automated location changes means that we’re a big step closer to rolling out Mothership to other countries! Read the rest of this entry »

SHOUT! on Mothership

Mothership Gay Dating has just had some big enhancements made to its SHOUT system.

Mothership’s SHOUT facility allows guys to broadcast a message simultaneously to all Mothership members who are currently on the Gay Forums or Who’s Onboard pages. The message appears in a scrolling ticker-tape format and allows a click through to the member’s profile.

In addition SHOUT also broadcasts messages about Mothership when the system is idle. We’ve updated SHOUT to bring you tons more benefits:

* SHOUTs now appear across the new Gay Forums, as well as Who’s Onboard
* Nearly all SHOUTS contain a profile or forum topic link for your convenience
* All shouts have a colour coding and an icon to denote what kind of SHOUT they are

SHOUTS are now made whenever: Read the rest of this entry »

Quentin Crisp

The screening of John Hurt’s adept portrayal of Quentin Crisp (1908-1999) as An Englishman In New York over Christmas has prompted a brusque response from Peter Tatchell in The Independent. While praising Hurt’s uncanny ability to reprise his role in The Naked Civil Servant, which depicted Crisp’s youthful bravery and flamboyant one-man crusade to be himself in the face of outright hostility, Tatchell says Quentin Crisp latterly expressed contempt for homosexuality, gay rights, and jealousy of a burgeoning gay movement that denied him his former place as the most outrageous queen on the block.

So what’s the truth about this man born in Surrey as Denis Pratt, who, after conquering Manhattan and expressing his ambition to meet everyone in the world, died back in the England he once so hated, on the eve of embarking on a sell-out speaking tour a month short of his 91st birthday? Read the rest of this entry »